The extreme ineptitude of Trump and his inner circle shouldn’t be shocking anymore. But there’s always another revelation that makes you shake your head in stunned disbelief:
Less than a month after he was named President Donald Trump’s cybersecurity adviser in 2017, Rudy Giuliani walked into an Apple store in downtown San Francisco.
He wasn’t looking for a new gadget. Giuliani was looking for help.
He was locked out of his iPhone because he had forgotten the passcode and entered the wrong one at least 10 times, according to two people familiar with the matter and a photo of an internal Apple store memo obtained by NBC News.
“Very sloppy,” said one of the people, a former Apple store employee who was there on the day that Giuliani stopped by in February 2017.
“Trump had just named him as an informal adviser on cybersecurity and here, he couldn’t even master the fundamentals of securing your own device.”Notes from an internal application that Apple uses for their service tickets show that Rudolph Giuliani came in with a disabled phone. Some personal information in the photo has been obscured by NBC News.Acquired by NBC News
A forgotten password is among the most common missteps in the digital age.
But Giuliani’s handling of the situation calls into question his understanding of basic security measures and raises the prospect that, as someone in the president’s inner circle, his electronic devices are especially vulnerable to hackers, two former FBI cyber experts told NBC News.
“There’s no way he should be going to a commercial location to ask for that assistance,” said E.J. Hilbert, a former FBI agent for cybercrime and terrorism.
Michael Anaya, a former FBI supervisory special agent who led a cyber squad for four years, reacted with astonishment when told about Giuliani’s Apple store visit.
“That’s crazy,” he said.
[…]
NBC News reported last week that Giuliani twice butt-dialed one of its reporters, leaving long voicemail messages in which he is heard discussing the Bidens, business in Bahrain and his need for cash.
Both of the accidental calls were made in the hours after Giuliani had spoken with the reporter.
In the first voicemail message left on Sept. 28, Giuliani can be heard bashing Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as well as recounting his effort to push Ukraine to launch an investigation into the Bidens. The second recording, left on Oct. 16, captured Giuliani talking to an unidentified man about Bahrain.
“The problem is we need some money,” Giuliani says in the voicemail message. “We need a few hundred thousand.”
[…]
Giuliani was named Trump’s cybersecurity adviser on Jan. 12, 2017, an informal position outside of the government.
“This is a rapidly evolving field both as to intrusions and solutions and it is critically important to get timely information from all sources,” the presidential transition office said in a statement on that day. “Mr. Giuliani was asked to initiate this process because of his long and very successful government career in law enforcement and his now sixteen years of work providing security solutions in the private sector.”
Exactly 26 days later, Giuliani was among a group of people standing outside the Apple store in San Francisco’s Union Square neighborhood before its doors swung open at 10 a.m., according to a former store employee.
[…]
NBC News sent an email to that personal address Wednesday afternoon with the name of this reporter below a brief message: “Mr. Giuliani — Trying to get in touch with you.”
Two minutes later, a one-word message from the email account landed in the reporter’s inbox: “Why?”
A follow-up email — explaining the details of this article and asking for a response — was not returned. A text message to Giuliani’s cellphone also went unreturned.
Apple did not return a request for comment.
In interviews, the two former FBI cyber experts said the two incidents taken together — Giuliani’s butt dials and reliance on Apple workers to help him reboot his phone — indicate a lax approach to mobile phone security.
“I can understand if you’re an auto mechanic or even a lawyer that these issues are not first and foremost in your mind,” Anaya said. “But I would like to think that for somebody that close to the president, this would be something they would take seriously.”
Anaya said the possibility that Giuliani might be using a personal phone for sensitive communications with the president and others would make him a prime target for foreign hackers.
“If I were a nation-state actor and that information became available to me, one of the first things I’d do is try to install some piece of malicious software that would allow us to see everything that comes in and out of that device,” Anaya said.
Hilbert said he’s also troubled by the fact that Giuliani’s cellphone data is backed up to Apple’s iCloud system, even if the former New York City mayor largely uses it as his personal phone.
This has been verified with the invoice and memo from the Apple store.
God only knows what’s on his phone that has been accessed by adversaries and enemies. It’s simply mindboggling.
The NRA and LaPierre should not be let off the hook
by digby
The NRA is trying to blame Wayne LaPierre’s malevolent (and successful) political strategy on their ad agency. I’m sure the ad agency is terrible. But let’s be serious:
A new complaint in a lawsuit filed by the National Rifle Association against its former advertising agency, Ackerman McQueen, alleges that the firm engaged in “a stunning pattern of corruption, fraud, and retaliation” that nearly topped the organization’s CEO.
The complaint filing from October 25 first reported by the Daily Beast, also claims the gun rights organization’s infamous “culture war” publicity strategy was largely constructed by Ackerman McQueen — and that NRA executives found its work “distasteful and racist.”
In response, Ackerman McQueen argues — as its executive vice president Bill Powers did in an email to me — that the complaint is only an effort to hide the fact that the NRA is “self-destructing.” Ackerman McQueen accuses the NRA of committing fraud itself and of covering up a vast number of misdeeds, including allegations of sexual harassment.
In its counterclaim, the advertising firm states that — contrary to the claims of the NRA — the gun rights group and its CEO, Wayne LaPierre, were well aware of the messaging being used in its content. In fact, Ackerman McQueen alleges that LaPierre would ask for “more gasoline” and even riskier language in order to gain more notoriety for the group. In Ackerman McQueen’s telling, the NRA was well aware of the ad firm’s spending, with LaPierre’s “apparent paranoia and lust for secrecy” ensuring that he knew everything about the ad agency’s shaping of the NRA’s digital media outlet, NRATV.
The dueling complaints indicate one certainty: the relationship between the NRA and Ackerman McQueen, one that began in the early 1980s and made the NRA the most recognizable and powerful gun rights organization in America, is now one for the courts to adjudicate.
And the consequences for both sides could be dire. For Ackerman McQueen, allegations of fraud and double-billing could sink an 80-year legacy in advertising. But for the NRA, the lawsuit and the increasingly embarrassing allegations that court filings have revealed about the organization have already proven to be a dangerous distraction.
A finding against the NRA in court could put the group’s very existence at risk. If it were to lose the suit — and its tax-exempt status — it would be subject to not just the cost of losing the suit, but also the cost of annual income taxes (and back taxes as well.)
The NRA claims it was misled into wasting millions of dollars on a “dystopian culture rant”
As I’ve written previously, the NRA and Ackerman McQueen’s current enmity stems from alleged financial mismanagement that may have put the gun rights group in financial jeopardy.
The souring stems from an NRA insurance program Ackerman McQueen helped to roll out that would cover legal fees for self-defense shootings. That program is under investigation by New York State authorities, and the costs of dealing with that probe have the gun rights organization increasingly concerned about its finances.
The NRA filed lawsuits against Ackerman McQueen, with one complaint alleging financial mismanagement, and another focused on NRATV. But the lawsuits have become a massive headache for the NRA and for the advertising firm, as allegations from both Ackerman and the NRA have led to former NRA president Oliver North stepping down from his post after just one year on the job amid allegations he attempted to blackmail NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre and fueled accusations of outrageous spending on both sides.
Some of the spending on Ackerman McQueen’s part is fueled by revenue it has gained from the NRA — in fact, according to reporting by the New Yorker and the Trace, only 10 percent of the gun rights organization’s money is being spent on gun safety, training, and education, with the rest going to “messaging” efforts, like an Ackerman-produced magazine created to show off wealthy NRA members’ cars and planes.
The October 25th filing alleges that much of the money the NRA spent on Ackerman McQueen’s services was rendered under false pretenses. It claims Ackerman McQueen went to great lengths to defraud the NRA, most visibly through NRATV, the organization’s online streaming service that shut down earlier this year. The NRA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The filing contends that Ackerman McQueen inflated viewership numbers for the streaming service, fabricating and “misrepresenting” the service’s performance. And the NRA claims that in 13 in-person meetings with NRA leadership and “countless emails,” that the advertising agency lied to the NRA in order to get it to spend more money on a service Ackerman McQueen knew was “based on underlying, unvarnished, fulsome metrics that it intentionally withheld from the NRA … an abject failure.”
They take particular aim at Dana Loesche’s grotesque political videos which is nice. But please …
Sixteen years ago, when Al Gore won the popular vote but was denied the presidency due to the anachronism known as the Electoral College, Democrats tried to figure out how they could prevent such a weird anomalous result from happening again. As early as the day after the election, the New York Times was already laying the groundwork for what would become seen as the reason for Gore’s failure (although it would be many weeks before the result of that contested election became clear).
Vice President Gore had failed to spend enough time in his home state of Tennessee, it was said, opting instead to put resources into other tossup states like Michigan and Wisconsin. But the real reason he lost was a grand geographical shift:
While Tennessee has moved to the right in national politics, Mr. Gore has moved to the left since his days as a congressman, particularly on issues like abortion and gun control that have put him at odds with many Southern voters.
Two years later, when The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber addressed the question again, conventional wisdom was sealed. Scheiber reported that on the eve of the 2000 Democratic convention the Gore team had realized they had a big problem:
“The entire target of communication was Pennsylvania, western Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa. That’s the world Gore was trying to reach,” [pollster Stan] Greenberg recalls. Since these areas were chock-full of gun-toting union members, Team Gore decided that gun control would hurt the vice president in the states he needed most.
After the election, the Gore campaign’s hunch became Democratic gospel. Sure, Gore had won the Rust Belt battleground states, but the Democrats had lost their third straight bid to retake Congress — and many in the party believed gun control was to blame. In particular, they pointed to the election’s regional skew. In famously anti-gun California, the Dems knocked off three incumbents. But throughout the rest of the country, they defeated only one. “Of all the issues,” insists one senior Democratic congressman, gun control “had the greatest net [negative] effect.”
That “regional skew” is a real problem. By 2004 candidate John Kerry was running around in a hunting vest with a gun slung over his shoulder bragging about always eating what he killed. Not that it did him any good. The fact that he was against the sale of assault-style weapons was assumed to have been the kiss of death when those white rural voters rejected him.
The need to move away from “culture war” issues like gun control, abortion and marriage equality was considered gospel during that period in the Democratic wilderness. Then came the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina and a teetering economy that caught up to the Republicans, and Democrats won big in 2008.The assumption then was that Barack Obama had managed to put together a new Democratic coalition that was not dependent on those rural whites who feared the loss of their guns so much they would vote against anyone who favored common-sense gun safety regulation.
We saw Democrats find their voices on the issue after a horrific spate of mass killings, particularly the horrifying Newtown tragedy, in which classrooms full of tiny children were mowed down by a disturbed young man with a semi-automatic weapon. It became a defining cause of the party, with President Obama taking the lead in pushing the issue and elected Democrats holding an unprecedented sit-in on Capitol Hill last spring to protest GOP inaction on guns.
During the Bush years as well as the Obama years, the National Rifle Association was as active as ever. In 2000 when Bush finally prevailed, they were happy to help push the idea that his support for their cause was the defining issue of the election. The organization had bragged that it would be working out of President Bush’s office in the White House and NRA influence grew throughout his tenure as the group put money and organizing behind gun-friendly politicians at all levels of government.
But perversely or otherwise, the NRA actually experiences more growth when a Democrat is in the White House, and has become more powerful than ever during the Obama years. As the gun-tracking news organization called the Trace points out in this article, the NRA did this with a “populist” P.R. approach that perfectly dovetailed with Donald Trump’s anti-establishment campaign. One might even suggest that Trump stole a lot of his shtick from the NRA.
In 2008, the NRA’s visionary leader Wayne LaPierre declared war on establishment elites saying that they “believe the same elite conceit — you shouldn’t protect yourself. Government should. But we know there’s a little problem with that. They don’t give a damn about you!” The Trace reported:
Four years later, LaPierre expanded on the threats the elite posed to encompass free speech, religious liberty, even the ability of people to start small businesses or choose for themselves what kind of health care they want. Drug dealing illegal immigrants were being allowed to pour over the Southern border, he railed. Criminals in big cities were free to prey on innocents because judges were so lenient. “Not our issues, some might say.” He paused, and then countered: “Oh, but they are.”
In fact, the NRA has been pushing an anti-establishment message in one form or another since the mid-’90s. When Trump came along, LaPierre understood that unlike the patrician Mitt Romney, Trump’s sometime apostasy on guns would be outweighed by his ability to sell pitchfork-wielding populism and thinly-veiled calls for vigilantism. So the NRA went all in for Trump and spent millions on ads bashing Hillary Clinton in places like Columbus, Ohio; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Scranton, Pennsylvania. (I wrote about their first ad here.) According to the Center for Public Integrity, nearly one out of 20 TV ads in Pennsylvania was paid for by the NRA, and the group ran nearly 15,000 spots in the crucial swing states that Trump narrowly won, deciding the election.
LaPierre has released a new video, taking a victory lap in which he fatuously declares, “Our time is now. This is our historic moment to go on offense.” First on the agenda is demanding that the federal government enforce “concealed-carry reciprocity,” in which states would have to recognize permits to carry concealed weapons issued by other states, as if they were as benign as driver’s licenses. So much for federalism.
Most election postmortems have concluded that Democrats failed with non-college educated and rural white voters this time because of their economic message rather than guns or other culture-war issues. But perhaps that’s just the other side of the same coin. LaPierre and the NRA have a powerful understanding of what moves this constituency and they’ve been moving it in their direction for many years. The NRA has been selling anti-establishment Trumpism long before Trump came on to the scene. It’s Wayne LaPierre’s win as much as Donald Trump’s.
This president will be in power for only a short time, but excusing his misbehavior will forever tarnish your name. To my Republican colleagues: Step outside your media and social bubble. History will not look kindly on disingenuous, frivolous, and false defenses of this man.— Justin Amash (@justinamash) October 31, 2019
Save your breath Justin. They can’t hear you. They never could.
Amash is not my political ally. He’s a libertarian with a lot of ideas that I find repugnant. But he’s consistent and he’s sane and he has respect for civil liberties and the rule of law which are the basic foundation of a fair and just society.
The fact that he’s literally the only Republican member of the House to break with the party over this criminal miscreant in the White House — an ignorant conman with no moral core or coherent ideology — who is selling out everything they supposedly believed in, tells you everything you need to know about the Republican Party.
This is the Secretary of State peddling truly lunatic conspiracy theories.
He’s spending more time in Kansas these days than Washington. He thinks he has a big future as a senator or maybe governor and then president.
Does he?
Are we that far gone?
Update: Apparently we are. Look who loves him:
First Rupert Murdoch stopped by a book party for VC Ben Horowitz, whose book “What You Do is Who You Are” was just published by HarperCollins. Then Murdoch headed to the Hudson Institute’s annual gala, where he introduced the night’s honoree, Mike Pompeo. Murdoch made a “President Pompeo” quip, and later said, “As accomplished as Mike Pompeo has been in his illustrious life, I’m sure there’s much more to come. Secretary of States usually do quite well once they move on. Incidentally, I’ve got a good publishing house if he wants to decide to write a book…”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sees the whites of his eye sockets. She has the votes and believes she will not miss. The House is set today to vote on a resolution setting rules for the impeachment inquiry of President Donald J. Trump.
The vote is on a resolution that would set rules for the public phase of an impeachment inquiry that has so far been conducted exclusively behind closed doors. It would authorize the House Intelligence Committee — the panel that has been leading the investigation and conducting private depositions — to convene public hearings and produce a report that will guide the Judiciary Committee as it considers whether to draft articles of impeachment against President Trump.
The rules will allow Trump’s lawyers will to participate in Judiciary Committee proceedings. Republicans may request subpoenas for witnesses and documents. Trump’s Republican defenders who accuse Democrats of running a “Soviet-style process” will get the openness and transparency they have demanded since hearings began.
“They want transparency like a hole in the head, for crying out loud,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.). “Transparency is not going to help them.”
Witness after witness has corroborated the original “fire alarm” account from the whistleblower.
Reporting from Tuesday’s appearance by Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s Ukraine expert, seemed only to deepen the impeachment hole Trump dug for himself. Vindman listened to the July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He attended the July 10 meeting in national security adviser John Bolton’s office in which European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland urged two Ukrainian officials to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that placed Hunter in its board. Sondland “emphasized the importance that Ukraine deliver the investigations into the 2016 election, the Bidens, and Burisma,” Vindman’s states in his opening statement.
White House Russia adviser Fiona Hill and Kurt Volker, the State Department’s special envoy to Ukraine also attended the meeting Bolton allegedly cut short after Sondland’s request. Hill has already testified in closed session. Sondland through his attorney denies mentioning the Bidens on July 10 or at any other discussion of Ukraine policy.
The Washington Post reports additional details from Vindman’s testimony about the July 10 meeting, the July 25 call, and complaints to White House lawyer John Eisenberg:
Vindman objected, telling Sondland that the request was “totally inappropriate,” according to a person familiar with his testimony.
As tensions mounted, Sondland asked the two Ukrainian officials if they would like to step out of the meeting temporarily, the person said.
Hill, whom Bolton had instructed to monitor Sondland, had just entered the Ward Room. She immediately echoed Vindman’s objections that the request was counter to national security goals, according to her testimony.
“She was very emotional,” one person who heard Vindman’s account of the meeting recalled, adding that Hill raised her voice and strongly objected.
Vindman and Hill complained directly to Eisenberg about the episode, according to his testimony and people familiar with their actions. It is unclear whether Eisenberg took any steps in response.
Vindman also reported the July 25 call to Eisenberg. Anonymous sources tell the Post Vindman provided a firsthand account identifying Eisenberg as the official responsible for isolating the July 25 call transcript within the National Security Council’s code-word-level server normally reserved for “intelligence programs and top-secret sources and methods.”
The call summary released by the White House omitted Zelensky’s mention of Burisma on the call, Vindman asserts.
The Post’s source on Vindman’s testimony said when Trump asked Zelensky “to do us a favor,” Vindman “looked up and made eye contact” with Tim Morrison, former deputy to national security adviser John Bolton. Vindman reported a second time to Eisenberg after the call, believing “it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine.”
Morrison has resigned in advance of his testimony today. Eisenberg is set to testify on Monday and Bolton on November 7.
“But the whistleblower” is dead and buried. Republican complaints about transparency in a process drafted and approved by a Republican-controlled House bear a DNR. Despite witness after witness testifying to the contrary, Trump continues to insist he has done nothing wrong.
…..the call with the Ukrainian President was a totally appropriate one. As he said, “No Pressure.” This Impeachment nonsense is just a continuation of the Witch Hunt Hoax, which has been going on since before I even got elected. Rupublicans, go with Substance and close it out!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2019
He insists Republicans defend him on the substance of the accusations. But that won’t help him, and so far, they won’t do it. Greg Sargent summarizes:
First, Trump wanted the Ukrainian president to launch “investigations” to absolve Russia of its role in sabotaging our election in 2016, and help rig the 2020 election by smearing potential opponent Joe Biden. This was dramatically reinforced by Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s testimony this week.
Second, part of the quid pro quo has already been established: We know that Trump’s ringleaders in this scheme, acting at Trump’s direction, conditioned a White House meeting on getting those “investigations.” That was confirmed in those texts and also reinforced by Vindman.
Televised testimony from recalled witnesses will only drive home the public impression that Trump was jeopardizing national security and essentially extorting opposition research on the Bidens for his own gain. Unclear is where Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman fit in, or where Parnas’ alleged fraudulent contributions to GOP politicians does, or the “suspicious transactions in Parnas’s accounts” now under investigation by the FBI. Trump’s actions and associations are painting his defenders into an ever-tighter corner.
Pulling on these threads only raises the potential for additional articles of impeachment and for Trump’s presidency to unravel whether or not Senate Republicans stand with him to the end.
You need to read this whole article. It’s mind-boggling to think a president of the United States could be so overwhelmingly, epically, dishonest about everything.
President Donald Trump was relentlessly dishonest last week about the scandal over his dealings with Ukraine, making false claims about just about every component of the story.
Trump made 96 false claims last week, the second-highest total of the 16 weeks we’ve counted at CNN. He made 53 false claims last Monday alone — a remarkable 31 in rambling comments at his Cabinet meeting and 22 more in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
Fifty-three false claims is by far the most Trump has made in any day in the 16 weeks we’ve tracked, beating the previous high of 41. Trump has averaged about 68 false claims per week over the 16-week period — just shy of 10 false claims per day.
His deception last week was focused on his conduct toward Ukraine and Democrats’ related impeachment inquiry. Deep breath now:
He falsely claimed he had released an exact transcript of his July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He falsely claimed he did not ask Zelensky for anything on the call. He falsely claimed people aren’t talking about the call anymore.
He falsely claimed the whistleblower complaint about the call was “totally wrong.” He falsely claimed the whistleblower alleged he had made seven or eight mentions of a “quid pro quo.” He falsely claimed the whistleblower has vanished. He falsely claimed Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff was the whistleblower’s source.
He falsely claimed Schiff had spoken about the call at a committee hearing before, not after, the release of the rough transcript. He falsely claimed Schiff’s committee comments were illegal. He falsely claimed Republicans aren’t allowed to ask questions in Democrats’ impeachment inquiry hearings. And he falsely claimed those closed-door hearings are unprecedented.
The most egregious false claim: Trump’s “prediction” about Osama bin Laden’
The President complained that the media doesn’t want to talk about his declaration, in a 2000 book, that Osama bin Laden needed to be killed. In fact, he didn’t say anything like that.
The President claimed that things would be different today if his prescient words had been listened to. Again, those words do not exist.
The President claimed that he still has people coming up to him marveling at his amazing “prediction” about bin Laden. Again, he did not make any prediction about bin Laden.
And the president claimed that it was an especially remarkable prediction because “nobody” had ever heard of bin Laden at the time. Bin Laden was being pursued by the CIA and had been put on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list the year before.
Here’s a full fact check of Trump’s elaborate fiction.
It goes on. And on. In fact, you just won’t believe anyone could lie this much.
Martin Longman at the Washington Monthly made note of a strange little nugget in today’s testimony of NSC officerCatherine M. Croft. It’s about former congressman Bob Livingstone of Lousiana, who is remembered mostly for being Newt Gingrich’s brief successor after the impeachment of Bill Clinton backfired and the GOP lost dozens of House seats. Livingstone, you may recall, only lasted a matter of days once it came out that the man who’d been calling for the smelling salts over Clinton’s affair was himself engaged in an extramarital affair of his own.
Well, he’s baaaack. Longman explains that Livingstone has been making big bucks as a lobbyist for foreign countries such as Egypt and Turkey. And now he’s turned up in this mess:
He’s in the news now because everyone will soon want to know who was paying him to seek the ouster of American ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as early as mid-2017.
Robert Livingston, the former Republican congressman turned lobbyist, repeatedly told a foreign service officer assigned to the White House that the American ambassador to Ukraine should be fired because of her association with Democrats, the officer plans to tell impeachment investigators on Wednesday.
The officer, Catherine M. Croft, will testify that she “documented” multiple calls from Mr. Livingston about the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, while she was working at the National Security Council from mid-2017 to mid-2018. She plans to say she informed two other officials — Fiona Hill, then the senior director for Europe and Russia at the council, and George P. Kent, a Ukraine expert at the State Department — about them at the time.
“He characterized Ambassador Yovanovitch as an ‘Obama holdover’ and associated with George Soros,” she will say, referring to the billionaire liberal philanthropist, according to a copy of Ms. Croft’s opening statement reviewed by The New York Times. “It was not clear to me at the time — or now — at whose direction or at whose expense Mr. Livingston was seeking the removal of Ambassador Yovanovitch.”
The direction and expense to oust Ms. Yovanovitch could very possibly have come directly from the Kremlin. If not directly, perhaps it came in a more roundabout fashion.
Let’s look at a different nexus. This one involves Rudy Giuliani, Bob Livingston and George Soros. This is from a Washington Post article Emily Tamkin published on September 30, 2019:
Last week, when Laura Ingraham of Fox News Channel asked Giuliani why he, and not the FBI and the Justice Department, had been sent to [Ukraine to] investigate alleged corruption, the former New York mayor said that it was because he is Trump’s personal lawyer. This, of course, prompted another question. How does investigating former vice president Joe Biden involve defending Trump? In response, Giuliani claimed that Biden had called for the firing of a prosecutor who was involved in the investigation of “an organization that was collecting false information about Donald Trump, about Paul Manafort, and feeding it to the Democratic National Committee.” If that sounds improbably complex, all you really need to know is the name he shouted out next: “That organization,” he said, “was run by George Soros.”
Giuliani repeated the claim on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “November of 2016, [the Ukrainians] first came to me, and they said, ‘We have shocking evidence that the collusion that they claim happened in Russia, which didn’t happen, happened in Ukraine, and it happened with Hillary Clinton. George Soros was behind it. George Soros’s company was funding it.’”
Needless to say, this is Kremlin disinformation that Giuliani has been spouting. It looks like Robert Livingston began promulgating these lies even earlier than Giuliani. The difference is that Giuliani has ostensibly been working on behalf of the president while Livingston very clearly makes his career serving foreign clients.
As Longman concludes, “it looks like this is a distinction without a difference.”
The decorated Army officer who testified to House investigators on Tuesday told lawmakers that a close associate of Republican Rep. Devin Nunes “misrepresented” himself to President Donald Trump in an effort to involve himself further in Ukraine policy, according to two people familiar with his closed-door deposition.
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s top Ukraine expert, told lawmakers that after attending Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration in May as part of a delegation led by Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Vindman had been looking forward to debriefing Trump and giving a positive account of Zelensky’s vision for Ukraine’s future.
“The U.S. government policy community’s view is that the election of Zelenskyy and the promise of reforms to eliminate corruption will lock in Ukraine’s Western-leaning trajectory, and allow Ukraine to realize its dream of a vibrant democracy and economic prosperity,” Vindman said in his opening statement.
But he was instructed “at the last second” not to attend the debriefing, Vindman told lawmakers, because Trump’s advisers worried it might confuse the president: Trump believed at the time that Kashyap Patel, a longtime Nunes staffer who joined the White House in February and had no discernible Ukraine experience or expertise, was actually the NSC’s top Ukraine expert instead of Vindman.
Vindman testified that he was told this directly by his boss at the time, NSC senior director for European and Russian affairs Fiona Hill.
Hill told Vindman that she and national security adviser John Bolton thought it best to exclude Vindman from the debriefing to avoid “an uncomfortable situation,” he said.
POLITICO previously reported that Hill testified that Trump thought Patel was in charge of Ukraine policy for the NSC, but Vindman’s exclusion from a key Ukraine meeting because of concerns over a potential conflict with Trump has not been disclosed before.
It helps explain why the president tweeted on Tuesday that he’d never met Vindman despite his clear interest in Ukraine — senior officials have said that Trump directed them to consult with his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, on matters of Ukraine policy.
And Vindman’s exclusion sheds even more light on the unusual steps top NSC officials were taking as early as May to avoid angering or annoying Trump on Ukraine issues — and the unusual level of access Patel had to the president.
“It’s crazy,” said one person familiar with Vindman’s testimony. “Vindman should have been in that meeting.”
Vindman also testified that he was told Patel had been circumventing normal NSC process to get negative material about Ukraine in front of the president, feeding Trump’s belief that Ukraine was brimming with corruption and had interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Democrats.
That upset Vindman, along with Hill and Bolton, he testified, because they were constantly having to counter that narrative with the president.
It’s still not clear what materials Patel was giving Trump, or where he was getting them. But he was not interacting with Ukraine experts at the State Department and Pentagon on the issue, and never had a conversation with Vindman, the NSC’s director for Ukraine, about Ukraine — or about anything for that matter, Vindman testified.
Patel joined the National Security Council’s International Organizations and Alliances directorate in February and was promoted to a senior counterterrorism role around the same time as Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky, in which he urged the newly elected leader to investigate Biden and “get to the bottom of” Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.
Patel had previously served as Nunes’ top staffer on the House Intelligence Committee and worked to discredit the FBI and DOJ officials investigating Russia’s election interference.
For that reason, Vindman was careful to not overtly criticize Patel so as not to anger Nunes — the ranking member of the intelligence panel — who floated in and out of the 10-hour deposition, according to a person familiar with his testimony.
Somehow, I don’t think this sort of thing is just happening with Ukraine. In fact, we already know that it’s happening with Russia. Probably Turkey. Almost certainly North Korea and China.
There is a faction within the White House, enabled by his accomplices in the US House, that is running a global shadow foreign policy. We just don’t know whose agenda is being served. For all we know, it’s not even Trump’s.
Devin Nunes’s little henchman needs to be deposed but I’m going to guess that Nunes would have a shit-fit. Hopefully, the press will keep on this.
“I’m not too dumb to commit all those crimes, I’m not!”
by digby
I’ve actually wondered how he was taking these insinuations that he’s just too stupid to have known that a quid-pro-quo (and every other crime he’s committed) was illegal and unethical. There are more than few people who have suggested that the poor man is just so intellectually limited he can’t tell right from wrong.
As Donald Trump gets dragged deeper, and deeper, and deeper into his Ukraine scandal and the impeachment inquiry accelerates toward a likely House vote before the year’s end, the president is increasingly insistent that, if he wanted to commit a crime, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to get caught.
At other times, Trump has privately avowed that if he wanted to commit the crimes or outrageous actions he’s accused of, he’d be smart enough to do it—and that people should stop saying he’s too dumb or incompetent to do crimes.
Last week, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal launched a novel defense of Trump, who Democratic lawmakers allege—as Capitol Hill testimony from senior administration officials suggests—attempted to force the Ukrainian government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a top political rival of Trump’s, in exchange for military aid that was being held up. The newspaper’s esteemed board argued that any talk of impeaching Trump is silly, in large part, because this president is likely too bumbling to execute that kind of scandalous quid pro quo.
“Intriguingly, Mr. [Bill] Taylor says in his statement that many people in the administration opposed the [Rudy] Giuliani effort, including some in senior positions at the White House,” the editorial board wrote. “This matters because it may turn out that while Mr. Trump wanted a quid-pro-quo policy ultimatum toward Ukraine, he was too inept to execute it. Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government, and most presidents at some point or another in office.”
Trump, a routine morning reader and skimmer of several newspapers’ print editions, saw this editorial—which was obviously meant to defend him—last week. And the president promptly began complaining about it to some of those close to him.
“[The president] mentioned he had seen it and then he started saying things like, ‘What are they talking about, if I wanted to do quid pro quo, I would’ve done the damn quid pro quo,’ and… then defended his intelligence and then talked about how ‘perfect’ the call [with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky] was,” said a source familiar with Trump’s reaction to the Journal editorial. Another person familiar with the president’s comments on the matter corroborated the account.
“He was clearly unhappy. He did not like the word ‘inept,’” the first source added.
Of course not. As he has told us dozens of times, he is a very stable genius. He’s so smart that he thinks it’s perfectly normal to say that about himself repeatedly,
The president’s negative response to the Journal editorial board’s musings mirrors his thinking on his now-infamous Zelensky phone call, which helped trigger the whistleblower complaint that led to the impeachment probe: He couldn’t have perpetrated an impeachable offense because he isn’t enough of an imbecile to get caught red-handed.
“How many more Never Trumpers will be allowed to testify about a perfectly appropriate phone call when all anyone has to do is READ THE TRANSCRIPT! I knew people were listening in on the call (why would I say something inappropriate?), which was fine with me, but why so many?” Trump posted to Twitter on Tuesday morning.
The president has tweeted statements to that effect several times. He also has publicly stressed to reporters, over and over again, that he knew others were listening in on his July conversation with Zelensky, and therefore he wasn’t going to try anything sketchy.
Trump has long been highly sensitive to any jabs, real or perceived, at his level of intelligence or competence. In July, for instance, he tweeted that he is “smart,” a “true Stable Genius!” and also “so great looking.”
Senior officials working in Trump’s West Wing are also often tasked with defending the president’s alleged brain power.
Over the weekend, Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said at a conference hosted by the Washington Examiner that he told the president not to “hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth… because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.” Kelly also said he regretted departing the administration and claimed he could have acted as a moderating force on Trump, thus forestalling the Democrats’ impeachment drive.
On Saturday, after Kelly’s comments began making the rounds, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham quickly returned fire, saying in a statement to CNN, “I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great President.
The “genius of our great President.”
No. He is stupid. Very stupid. But not so stupid that he didn’t know he was committing crimes. He had just deduced from the reaction from the Mueller report that he could get away with anything.
